Originally Posted by
narvik
I am a little confused by UNITED's MAX airplanes. Are they ALLOWED to be in the air currently, without passengers?
According to this site:
https://simpleflying.com/united-airl...7-max-flights/
United flew a MAX on June 29th, 2020 from Arizona to Florida for maintenance, but it appears they posted a wrong Flightaware link:
"
United Airlines Flew A Boeing 737 MAX Across The US Yesterday
...According to FlightAware, a United 737 MAX 9 took off from Goodyear, Arizona, at 13:43 MST to fly all the way to the east coast of the US. It took only four hours and 18 minutes to reach its destination of Orlando, Florida, at 21:01 EDT. Registration N37513 was performing flight number UA2708 for a total distance of 1,993 mi (3207 km)...."
But if you check the tail number N37513, that plane did indeed fly on July 16th, 2020 from Florida back to Arizona (presumably after maintenance & back into storage?):
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N37513
So, United is apparently still flying tests and performing maintenance on their stored MAXs?
That is correct, you can petition the FAA and get a one time certificate to fly the plane - I think they are called "Special Airworthiness Directive" and an inspector looks over records etc and allows the plane to fly
I **think** it is typically used in the private plane world if a plane was sitting and passed a maintenance check and they need to fly the plane to a place to get the maintenance done - as long as all other maintenance is up to date and the plane passes a pretty thorough visual inspection, then the FAA grants the exception.